“’They’re never far from us, you know.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘The dead. No more’n a breath.
You let that last one go, and you’re with them again.’”

William Kent Krueger

We had houseguests last month. Three to be exact, which meant cleaning the guest room plus both kids’ bedrooms. We’ve hosted people in Molly’s room before, but no one has slept in Jimmy’s since the final weeks of his life. His feet had been growing increasingly numb. We worried he would lose his balance on the stairs and fall so we moved him into the downstairs guest room. The house was full most nights back then with the people he loved most. Molly was still in high school which meant Jimmy’s room, the couch, even the carpeted loft had beloveds sleeping there. It wasn’t until after Jimmy’s death that his room became a shrine.

Over the years, we’ve given a few of Jimmy’s possession to his best friends or one of ours. Molly and I wear some of Jimmy’s clothing, and I borrow his books. Last summer, she and I went through everything and made a pile that, with Dan’s approval, could go to Goodwill.

But when I walked in to put fresh sheets on the bed, I was struck by the way the room still feels as though it’s Jimmy’s. That the space, like me, is waiting for him to come home as if he were away at school or working out of state and like Molly, would be back soon for a visit.

After I cleaned the bathroom, I walked over to the six-foot-high bookcase and ran my hand over some of Jimmy’s favorites. The complete Harry Potter collection, all in hardback, except the first one. The one his friend Gregory gave him in second grade that started Jimmy’s obsession with reading and listening to the series over and over. My tattered childhood collection of Paddington the Bear stories that we read together, laughing over Paddington’s mishaps and obsession with marmalade. The textbooks he kept from college. On The Day You Were Born, Goodnight Moon and other lovingly chosen childhood picture books my mother gave him.

I raised my eyes to the upper shelves to examine the photos of Jimmy playing sports at all ages. Soccer, basketball, baseball. Initially co-ed then all boys. All but one still in the cheap cardboard they came in. Only his beloved second grade basketball team, “The Undefeatables” in a wooden frame. Looking at his joy-filled, sometimes sweaty face, I can hardly believe he’s no longer here to chuckle about our shared memories of those days. The victories and the defeats. The boy from his junior high basketball team who was cruel, the one whose face Jimmy scribbled over with a ballpoint pen..

Despite being more than twelve years gone, Jimmy’s room remains what Celtic mythology calls a thin place. A sacred space where the boundary of the known world and the other world become translucent. A spot where the living can see through to the other side. One where those who believe feel closer to God. St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. The Blue Mosque in Istanbul. A host of locations throughout Ireland.

Ordinary spots can be thin places, too. Jimmy’s best friend’s basement where the boys played video games for hours and drank the homemade milk shakes Willie’s mother Shelby made for them. Powell’s bookstore. The beach at the Oregon coast.

Outside of his room, I feel closest to Jimmy out on a trail, either alone with our dog or trailing behind Dan and Molly. He and I always strolled together on family hikes, leaving Molly and Dan to motor on ahead. Sometimes talking, sometimes not, never more than a few feet apart, we’d move in companionable silence, matching our strides. He was with me so often in those settings that even now, I can feel him with me still.

He’s there when I take the dog out for the last time before bed especially on the nights when the darkened sky is clear, and the stars glow white against it. The world is quiet except for the rustling of the deer in the grass and the frogs singing in the creek. Just for a moment, the sky moves closer, and I can see Jimmy standing there in the moonlight. In that place with no coordinate on anyone’s map but mine, the energy of our shared particles still dancing between us. The meeting point between the mundane and the divine. The place where Jimmy will find me whenever I let that last breath go.